Max Read

We told you yesterday that Vine — the Twitter-owned video-sharing iPhone app that debuted last week — was "America's hottest new porn search engine." But it's more than just a search engine now: it's almost a curated porn blog.

For some reason the very explicit, self-descriptive "dildo play" by "nsfwvine" hit the top of Vine's "Editors Picks" feed (the section of the app meant to show off interesting or creative vine videos) this morning. It was quickly pulled off, but not before dozens of people registered their disapproval: "First video I see after downloading app," one commented. "Very disappointed vine," another wrote.

This is bad news for Vine, which has to stay on the side of Apple's puritanical app regulations. Just a few weeks ago, a popular photo-sharing app called 500px was yanked from the App Store for "featuring pornographic images and material."

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But what's really odd about it is that contrary to yesterday's hyperbolic claims on tech blogs, Vine didn't really have a "porn problem." The incidence of not-safe-for-work vines — most of them by our friend nsfwvine — was actually fairly low (there were a lot more vines of the other two internet-content drivers: cats and brunch), and you had to search to find them. As Josh Topolsky pointed out on The Verge, it wasn't Vine so much as Apple that has a porn problem.

But when the porn is at the top of your app's public, show-offy face to the world, it's hard not to agree: Vine has a porn problem. Or at least, an Editor's Picks algorithm problem. Or a very bad "editor."